Nessus

Lumps of Coal, polished by tumbling, into what the Rock trade calls “Jet.” In the Yangtegrity World it’s the perfect symbol for Exploitable Resources, mountaintops be damned, literally. Along with Communities in the Valleys. But in the Yintegrity World it’s always symbolized Protection, a good example of Heads and Tails, raising the question, What’s the Coin? Vulnerability, and our Ability, Willingness, and Right to be Safe while being Vulnerable. Without that there is no Relationship, no Community, and no Cooperation, only PowerUnder.

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Just noticed that the Centaur Nessus is Stationary turning Retrograde on June 3, making it Strong these days.

for starters. Nessus is about PowerOver. If you haven’t read Starhawk’s fabulous book Truth or Dare, you may not understand the difference between PowerOver and PowerWith. We’ve just been talking about PowerOver, as we’ve been discussing whether or not to accumulate new Karma by cataloging your Wants in terms that may ensnare Others.

Nessus was a Centaur working as a Ferryboat. When Hercules sent his wife across the water, Nessus tried to rape her in midstream. How he might manage that physically is beyond me, but this is Mythology, and Rules Change in the Reaches. At any rate, once they got to the other side, Hercules fatally wounded Nessus with an arrow. As he was dying though, Nessus hatched a scheme wherein Hercules’s wife would ultimately conspire to kill Hercules, which she eventually did. Evil personified, right? You’d think it was Ixion.

But when we look at this transaction through the eyes of Bernadette Brady, who informs us that Hercules was to Zeus as the Inquisition was to the Medieval Catholic Church – that is, Hercules’s Mission was to eradicate the Old, Feminine-centered Worldviews – the picture Changes. Hercules failed in this part of his Mission, but what was preserved in the Patriarchal Mythology was the inevitability of Masculine Privilege. Our Hyperhero Hercules could manage to get Pholius (Responsibility) and Asbolus (Intuition) disappeared, but not Nessus and Privilege. And the role of the Feminine in this story? Gullible double-crosser.

In our efforts to recast astrology without negatives, nasty characters like Ixion and Nessus in a chart don’t imply that you (in a natal chart) or the Zeitgeist (in a chart of the Current Moment) are nasty, they imply that this is how you (or we, now) bring such nastiness into Consciousness, and Heal our Karma around it.

At its current Station, Nessus joins the Ixion-Pallas-Pholus Stellium in forming a base for a Quintile Yod to Venus. Hard to imagine a better Configuration for Healing Chauvinism in our Inner Male and Outer Masculinity, and Healing Subservience in our Inner Female and Outer Femininity – for folks of any gender.

So the key here is Awareness, Awareness of any tendencies or instances of Masculine Privilege or Feminine Collaboration with Privilege. In my experience, Masculine Privilege isn’t limited to men, and Feminine Collaboration with Privilege isn’t limited to women, though obviously, in a Patriarchy, gender alignment would predominate. But I often see women using their Intuition as a weapon, believing that because they Trust their Insight, they have the right to PowerOver others rather than Negotiate Win-Win. Watch for tendencies or instances of that. And when men set aside their own Truth for the sake of avoiding conflict with their Alpha rather than Negotiating Win-Win, that’s Feminine Collaboration with Privilege on their part. Be mindful of that as well.

It’s not that we want to automatically Judge these Patterns. We want mostly to notice whether we Habitually practice any of them, as Victim or Perpetrator. If we notice a tendency or instance of PowerOver and what we might call PowerUnder (Collaboration with Privilege), the question to Ask ourself is, “Does this behavior seem appropriate for the circumstances?” Objectively. Not “Yes, because I’m angry!” or “Yes, because they deserved it!” but “Does it further my ultimate goals for myself and for the Planet?” Anger and Revenge may not be Values you wish to see cemented into the core of your Future Reality.

This Dance of Consciousness takes on a special role here with Yintegrity prominent on our menu. We could Ask, “Does this behavior meet my understanding of Yintegrity?” and in particular, “Does it Conflict with the Agreements that my Yangtegrity has made?” This is one of our major Tasks here in this Uranus-Pluto debriefing period – Adjusting and Rebalancing our Yintegrity and Yangtegrity so that they Collaborate most Gracefully to further our Mission and improve our Lives.

And lo, the Nessus Station forms an Octile-Trioctile Bridge across the Uranus-Haumea Opposition, the Octile series representing Adjustment and Rebalancing.

So this Conscious Rebalancing of our Yintegrity versus our Yangtegrity, and the Readjustment of our Choice of PowerWith versus PowerOver or PowerUnder, is a significant part of our Rebirth into the New World that we’re Co-Creating. In the Yangtegrity World, to the extent that we still Collaborate with it, and most of us still do quite a lot, PowerOver and PowerUnder is everyday, much-approved behavior, as long as it’s rank-apppropriate. That World is Changing fast, and our everyday Choices are the catalysts that facilitate the Change.

The Archetypal image of the Corporation is an organization that most Values quarterly profit for shareholders, and considers the Natural and Human Environments in which it operates as expendable and replaceable Resources that require only a few footnotes in the Annual Report, to placate the Do-Gooders. Not even the Future viability of the organization is Valued, because the organization is run by psychopaths who Value their hyperinflated golden parachutes and severance contracts more highly than the Future of the Planet or anything else. And many businesses are still run this way.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Madison Avenue and the Republican Party were the biggest buyers of NLP training, using them to Manipulate us with their targeted advertising and propaganda. With the advent of Google and its admirers and imitators, technology has improved the targeting to the extent that they can now tell you one thing, and your next-door neighbor something entirely different, and expect that the likelihood of their getting “caught lying” is nil. NLP techniques can be Powerful tools, but unfortunately and perhaps not surprisingly, they’re used most often by Power-hungry people.

Since then though, the tools for growing Consciousness have moved more toward PowerWith, and executives and managers of organizations have been some of the most frequent users of training in these tools. While most of the Power still lies with Yangtegrity organizations, more organizations are moving toward Yintegrity, and a subset of technology increases the opportunity for neighbors to compare notes and become Conscious of when they’re being Manipulated. When we reach our Tripping Point, Yangtegrity organizations and their PowerUnderlings may Choose to Trip with us.

2 Responses to “Nessus”

I think it’s interesting how with the advent of digital marketing and social media, companies have had to change, from advertising to us, to working to build a relationship with us, the customer. In the selling frenzy brand marketers have to work out now to connect with their consumers and hope they say nice things about them online. At the moment it is mostly fakery but it is a route to becoming connected and I think that in time the technological glamour will die down and we will start to pull together more to save the planet.